Alex Renton, winner of the Best Article – Comment and Features category for his investigative piece in The Observer titled “Rape, child abuse and Prince Charles’s former school”.

Over the festive break, we’ll be sharing reflections from each of our 2015 Write to End Violence Against Women Awards winners which were originally published in the National Newspaper on 11 December 2015.

I’M so pleased and proud to get a prize in these excellent awards – particularly because my 11-year-old daughter Lulu came along to Holyrood to see me get my hands on the glassware.

It’s good that she knows Scotland will not tolerate violence against women and children – and that her dad’s job, often pretty silly-looking, can be part of that task.

Our long investigation of child rape and other crimes at Gordonstoun School in Moray was motivated by two things. One was the need to show that the flaws in protection systems for the vulnerable occur at all levels of society: in “great” public schools as well as in care homes. So does the culture of complacency and cover-up.

The other was to point up how terribly the Scottish legal system lets down survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Scottish advocates will tell you that we have the best legal system in the world; but it is plain to victims of rape or of violence in the home that, for them, our system is one of the worst